A typical home audio-visual equipment setup includes a number of components. For example, a radio receiver, a CD player, a pair of speakers, a television, a VCR, a tape deck, and alike. Each of these components is connected to each other via a set of wires. One component is usually the central component of the home audiovisual system. This is usually the radio receiver, or the tuner. The tuner has a number of specific inputs for coupling the other components. The tuner has a corresponding number of control buttons or control switches which provide a limited degree of controllability and inter-operability for the components. The control buttons and control switches are usually located on the front of the tuner. In many cases, some or all of these buttons and switches are duplicated on a hand-held remote control unit. A user controls the home audiovisual system by manipulating the buttons and switches on the front of the tuner or, alternatively, manipulating buttons on the hand-held remote control unit.
This conventional home audiovisual system paradigm has become quite popular. As the number of new consumer electronics devices for the home audiovisual system has grown and as the sophistication and capabilities of these devices have increased, a number of problems with the conventional paradigm have emerged. One such problem is incompatibility between devices in the home audiovisual system. Consumer electronic devices from one manufacturer often couple to an audiovisual system in a different manner than similar devices from another manufacturer.
For example, a multi-disc DVD player made by one manufacturer may not properly couple with a television made by another manufacturer and, thus, may not allow full access to all of its capabilities. For example, the multi-disc player might not incorporate hardware (e.g., specific inputs and outputs) which enables the more sophisticated functions of the multi-disc DVD player to be used with devices made by other manufactures. As such, these functions may not be usable with simpler, less sophisticated televisions or cable decoders.
Home AV (audio-visual) systems which include multi-disc player devices are particularly problematic because of the large volume of information the multi-disc player is able to contain and access. For example, there are several multi-disc compact disc (CD) players on the market that can hold 200 CDs or more. Considering the fact that a typical CD may include 10 or more individual "tracks" (e.g., songs), a fully loaded multi-disc player can present the user with an extremely large, virtually indecipherable mountain of information. This problem may be made even more difficult given the fact that there may be no intuitive, readily usable way to access the various tracks with any other remote control (e.g., the tuner's remote control) of the home AV system.
While the emergence of networking and interface technology (e.g., IEEE 1394 serial communication bus and the wide spread adoption of digital systems) offers prospects for correcting the above problems, there is still no coherent, open, extensible architecture which can provide for intelligent content navigation and selection with multi-disc player devices. There is no system for keeping a user informed by providing status reporting and notification between devices within a home AV system. As IEEE 1394 technology spreads across product lines, it is necessary to define logical models and command sets for various devices or functional groups such as VCR's and multi-disc players.